МНЕНИЕ

Opinion

In ancient philosophy, imperfect, subjective knowledge, as distinct from authentic, objective knowledge, truth. Already the Eleatics sharply differentiated between truth based on rational knowledge and opinion based on sensory perception and the appearance of things. With the atomists, opinion is the result of "images" projected to man; phenomena perceived through senses exist in opinion, whereas atoms and the vacuum exist in reality.

The sophists erased the boundary between opinion and truth ("everything is as anybody believes it to be"), which led them to the extreme subjectivism and relativism. According to Plato, opinion is divided into conjecture and belief and applies to sensory things, whereas knowledge has spiritual entities for its own subject. For Aristotle, opinion is the empirical method of knowledge, whose subject-matter can change and become false, since it is classed among the accidental and individual. Aristotle distinguished opinion from scientific knowledge, which has for its subject the essential and the universal.